Tag Archives: the creative process

Sunbeams from the August sun slip their way through iron latticework and stretch themselves out onto my balcony’s floor. My foot treads over these morning pools of light, and I am happy for their pleasant warmth before the heat of the day. I am still bleary-eyed, half-listening to the voices of John Oliver and Andy Zalztman floating out of my phone and through my open bedroom door. I am not yet awake enough to comprehend their podcast’s creative bullshittery, but that will soon come. For now, I am awake enough to water my balcony’s container garden.

The plants, encircled by their neat little pots, seem to spread themselves out, stretching in the morning sun. Basil, nasturtium, watercress, thyme, dill, and lettuce—all swollen with the quiet voluptuousness of a late summer garden. As I tip my pitcher down to wet the soil, a sunbeam sparks in my periphery. I turn towards it. There, catching the edge of a lettuce leaf is a thread of spider silk, coruscating in the morning sun. It stretches out to the iron latticework at the balcony’s edge as its crystalline twin runs a similar path eight inches above it. In between these parallel lines spirals the ingenuity and nature of a spider.

I stare at the web. It’s lovely.

I like spiders. Well, I should say that I like them in a garden setting. I do not like spiders when they drop down from my kitchen ceiling and surprise me. That sort of behavior usually gets them put in a drinking glass and promptly taken out to the back garden or balcony: you know, places that happily play to their strengths. Places where their intricate webs trap the insects that eat young and vulnerable plants.

A breeze moves through the balcony space, ruffling the lettuce leaves. But this is not the mild-mannered breeze of a summer day, this is a stiff breeze, somewhat cool, somewhat hinting at the beginning of another season—one that is usually festooned with bright leaves and cinnamon-spiced beverages. The lettuce leaf shakes violently and the thread that adorned its edge is gone, leaving the web sagging and lopsided.

Then the spider appears. It carefully picks its way across the damaged web before jumping out into the empty space between web and leaf, trailing a long, silken tendril behind it. The spider lands on the corner of the table that holds the pots, and attaches the new thread. It then climbs the thread back to its web, and begins again the process of weaving.

I walk back into my bedroom to the sound of Andy beginning an epic punrun. I should leave the spider to its work. Yes spiders are wonderful garden companions, but I love spiders the most for their creativity and courage. I admire their ability to jump out into the unknown to weave new webs, especially in the wake of damaging, unexpected winds.

Thursday, March 12, 2015, was a sad day for me. For it was the day that Sir Terry Pratchett, creator of Discworld, satirical-humanist extraordinaire, and recreational swordsmith, died.

Before leaving us at age 66, due to a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease, Terry treated the world to more than 70 books, for young and old alike. After hearing the news, I wept, in sadness and in joy. For in losing Terry, I lost a beloved teacher. But in the wake of his loss, I also gained a sense of gratitude for exactly how much this white-bearded, epic-hat-wearing author influenced me as a human being and as a fledgling writer.

Terry was a gateway author for my 12 year-old soul, ushering me into a world where my small town life and my late middle school self were finally mirrored back to me. Through characters like Susan Sto Helit, Mort, Jeremy Clockson, The Abbot, Death, and The Sweeper, Terry gave me the courage to be weird. It was okay that I didn’t fit in with my peers, because there in Sir Pratchett’s novels were dreamers, philosophers, over-thinkers, humanists, people well-intentioned but socially awkward. You know, human beings that acted a lot like me. Through Good Omens, he introduced me to Neil Gaiman, whose work inspires me more than any other author. And it was the energy and crystalline precision of Terry’s sentences that first made me think: “Hm, maybe I’d like to spend more of my life writing. I’d love to create sentences like that.”

There is a question all this reflection brings up: why haven’t I spoken about him more? When I was asked to name my major creative influences in a recent interview, Terry didn’t come up in my answer. Which was odd. I’m usually a person who is self-reflective and systematic about her writing. I can tell how and why a writer has had an impact of my craft and even show you examples. But why haven’t I ever mentioned Terry? I read him with just as much gusto and frequency as any of my other favorite authors. I think my previous silence about Terry was twofold—I was intimidated by him and I’m only now realizing the depth of his impact. This filters into one thing: his plot structure. God, the way he wrote plot intimidated me. It was full of scenes that popped and whizzed through your senses, making you laugh, cry, and ponder the mysteries of humanity. It felt frenzied, but the madness always breathlessly hung together with a careful precision.

No one plots novels like Terry. And to me, that’s what makes an artist—they create something that only they can create. His plots are so beautiful and personalized to him, that I don’t know if I could ever directly use his tactics in my work. Yet, thinking of writing scenes of varying length that carefully fit together instead of writing in well-measured chapters, is getting my first novel draft on the page. Who knows if this is how I will keep it. But Terry’s writing style encourages me to think of the piece like a clock, to write it so that my character’s worlds and desires click and whirr together, freeing me from chapter quotas and keeping me ever mindful of how the larger project may end up fitting together.

Thank you Sir Terry for your wonderful stories. You truly were a writer uniquely your own. I shall deeply miss reading your new words and I am grateful for the continued guidance of your old ones.

I say this as I stare at a blank portion of screen in Microsoft Word. The sentences of past writing sessions stream before and after this space, for pages and pages, but I cannot marvel at their existence now. I must write 300 words in that blank space: 300 words that will tell me what will happen next, 300 words that will bring the beginning and end of a novel draft closer to completion.

I wrinkle my brow. It’s only 300 words. That’s not a lot. Though today it feels like a lot. Today, the thought of writing even 50 words feels painful and anxiety inducing.

Thanks, writer’s block. I have no idea what to say. I don’t know what direction to take my characters in. I don’t know how to continue the plot.

And that’s when I stop, walk into my kitchen, and make a pot of tea.

And as I pack tea leaves into a tea ball, my mind begins to wander: Why? Why don’t I know my characters’ directions? Why don’t I know how to continue the plot?

Asking “Why?” always helps my writer’s block.

The answer starts to present itself as I lower the tea ball into an empty teapot. I don’t know my characters’ directions, because I’m jealous of them. In their fictional lives, love and intimacy are just next door for them. They find it happily in friends and significant others who live out daily nothing’s with them. The people who are dearest to me are peppered about the United States and the world—marvelous, if you like to write letters and travel (which I do), but not so marvelous when you need a shoulder to sob into or someone to tell you about the trivial details of their day. My lack of words was my petty attempt not to face my jealousy.

I don’t know where the plot is going because it’s moving in directions beyond my life experience. My lack of words in this case is a symptom of my insecurity that a reader, a editor, a publisher, will notice that I am out of my league and make fun of me for it.

I carefully pour hot water into the teapot with the packed tea ball. Into this hollow, ceramic vessel flows water, which soon will be tea. And I think of that blank space that waits for me in Microsoft Word. It may not contain 300 words, but it is flowing with existential questions. Questions I must notice and answer as I write on. I’ll need more than 300 words to do that.

About a month ago, my friend Kim wrote an excellent blog post about writing in the morning. I read it at the beginning of January, on a train ride from New York to New Haven. The post was full of luscious descriptions of gourmet oatmeal and the pure joy of putting together sentences. The whole piece was a pleasure to read, but one line stood out in particular to me: Kim wanted her readers to enjoy their morning drafts, to revel in their messiness, to take delight in slipping outlandish ideas and sentences into their work before their inner editor woke up. “Much of life” she wrote, “is messy process folks, not product.” This line made me laugh hysterically, startling the reveries of my fellow train passengers, but I didn’t care. I laughed because her words felt so damn true.

It turns out that my friend’s line was a prolific harbinger, giving shape to my next thirty days. My January was quite messy—full of chaos, lessons, and growth. It was a time that stretched my understanding of life, essay writing, librarianship, and human nature. And during that month, I was rarely able to make my bed. My mornings before work found me on my laptop, typing in a sea of blankets, before throwing on work clothes and running out the door. During the day, no bedspread calmed this unruly sea. The blankets stayed rumpled and exposed, with grammar and theology books hiding in their folds.

Not having time to make my bed felt odd. It’s one of those morning rituals that makes me feel like I have life in order. That I can be just as flawless and put together as a smooth bedspread and artistically placed pillows. But I wasn’t this past January and didn’t have the time to make believe that I was. There was nothing finished about January—I was in a process, growing and creating. And a made bed is a product. But a rumpled, unmade, bed is a space of possibility, a place to live into an ever changing life.
The right companion for a messy process.

Yesterday was Jane Austen’s 239th birthday and it was a day I observed by joyfully rereading my favorite parts of Persuasion (um…Sophia Croft being a badass lady adventurer, the awesome debate Anne Elliot has with Captain Harville on whether men or women love the longest when all hope is gone, and Captain Wentworth’s letter of reconciliation to Anne…yeah, that book contains some intellectually and emotionally hot stuff. Also, the Regency Era British Royal Navy: you know there are men of feeling with sideburns present.) and sought out Henry Tilney’s sassiest observations in Northanger Abbey (he really is the best).

Yet on a day when I reread Jane with gleeful abandon, I caught myself being introspective. As I met this fine author again in her sparkling stories, I realized why it is so hard for me to write directly about her in my own work. Jane is too close to me. She has influenced me more deeply than any other author, living or dead (though C.S. Lewis and Neil Gaiman are a close second and third to her magnificence). After all of my blathering about her brilliant narratives, outlandish characters, and smart social commentary, what truly draws me back to Jane again and again is the deep feeling of warmth, understanding, and safety her narrative voice gives me. Yet, though I know these feelings and I feel these feelings, I cannot articulate to you their particular natures.

As a writer, you need to have some distance to get anything done. I find it is much easier to write about things when you are on the outskirts, quietly observing the bustle and struggles of others. I could never have that distance with Jane. I’m too close. Jane is too dear. It was her Anne Elliot that helped a twelve-year-old me feel a little less lonely. It was her keen social observations that helped an awkward teenage and young adult me begin to understand the wonder and giddiness and awfulness of human nature. And it was her own confidence and commitment to her craft that still inspires me today.

No, I cannot have distance from Jane. I never will. Her stories have woven themselves far too deeply into my soul. But, I can have patience and allow time to help me figure out her influence upon me. For walking constantly with someone over time can be just as good as observing that someone from a distance.

Plus, it gives me an excuse to read her more often. Not that I ever needed one.

Next month, a short story of mine will be appearing in the inaugural issue of The Young Raven’s Literary Review. You can preview an excerpt from “A Fruitful Tale” here: http://www.youngravensliteraryreview.org/

The preview also includes an interview in which I talk about my major creative influences as well as my major crush on the character, Daniel Deronda (seriously, it was a very good day when George Eliot decided to tell Mr. Deronda’s story in 800 glorious pages. I honestly believe his existence cancels out all the whiny douchebaggery of any Charles Dickens hero).

Most of me is excited for the world to read “A Fruitful Tale” next month. It is a story that I needed to write, and, it has delighted and helped my inner circle of friends. If it has helped and delighted me and those I hold the closest to me, I’d be a short-sighted story miser to keep it from others. But, there is simultaneously a small bit of me that is currently going: “OH GOD. OH GOD. OH GOD. I’M EXPOSING BITS OF MY INNER LIFE TO STRANGERS. I FEEL SOOOO NAKED AND VULNERABLE AND THAT NAKEDNESS AND VULNERABILITY IS SUPER PUBLIC AND THAT COMBINATION IS JUST THE WORST. WHY AM I DOING THIS TO MYSELF?”

I shouldn’t be surprised that this small bit of me has such a big worry. I am putting a piece of fiction into the world, and as a writer, I find writing fiction to be much more exposing than writing non-fiction. In non-fiction, I can direct my audience’s gaze, neatly hedging in their reading experience with carefully articulated facts and emotions. The pronoun “I” can be used to create intimacy, but it also can be used to control. I am letting you into my head. And I am tightly controlling your perception of my narrative.

That’s not how it is when I write fiction. There is something about a narrative which is created from abstraction that leaves me and my most inner of inner lives completely naked. I’ve been writing fiction since I was ten and this truth still surprises me. Creating a fictional story turns off the hyper self-aware part of me, leaving me to show my audience only how I feel. Fiction cannot be distracted by a sequence of exterior events—it is crafted from the ideas and joys and muddles that are always flowing through my body. Writing fiction is as interior as I can get, and with me, deep interiority is tied to inarticulate notions of privacy, intimacy, and vulnerability.

Gah, so utterly terrifying.

Yet, so utterly exhilarating.

Since fiction is such an exposing craft, it allows me to give words to that which is most private and unsayable for me. By articulating this, I get to see me and my desires and my longings better. Which, in turn, helps others to see themselves and their desires and their longings better. My willingness to tell a secret story swirling around in my subconscious will help others to be brave and start telling their own.

And knowing that my vulnerability in fiction may help others, makes all the trouble worthwhile—even though there is still that little bit of me breathlessly rambling on in all caps.

There it is: a jumble of colors, shapes, and textures splayed out upon my floor. The farthest reaches of the piles snake out in crumpled desperation, reaching out to me, reaching out to my bedroom’s four walls.

I stare at them, as a slightly sick feeling quietly gargles in my stomach. I’ve sorted my dirty laundry, it’s now in piles (chaotic, fibrous piles of doom) on my bedroom floor. All I have to do now is take it downstairs, put it in a washing machine, and be at the mercy of the laundry cycle for the rest of the day.

And interspersed between the washing and drying will be folding. A shit ton of folding. I don’t like folding things. That is why the vast majority of my wardrobe already lives on hangers.

I swallow. Wait. I still have underwear. I still have stockings and leggings. Do I really need to do laundry now? Is this a chore I must get done today?

Carefully, I step around the cloth blob that is now my bedroom floor and open my closet door. There is that blue sundress from high school I never wear. Perhaps I could pair it with a short-sleeved red blazer that has been gathering dust this season. The colors will contrast in interesting ways. And here is that leopard print wrap dress from Ann Taylor that makes me feel like a loud, Las Vegas brod who frequently hangs out with the Rat Pack, smoking cigars and drinking scotch. I’lI play up that aesthetic by adding bright accessories—a turquoise belt and a fuchsia camisole underneath. Or, what about my bright green and blue argyle cardigan? An amazing statement piece that I never wear enough. It would look stunning over my forest green dress—add an oxblood colored belt and heels, and I’d be set.

I step away from my closet and promptly return the clothing piles on my floor to the hamper. Clearly, I have enough outfits in my closet to last me a few more days. And I’m excited about them! They will be new combinations, adding life and creativity to my wardrobe.

That sick feeling in my stomach is gone, replaced by the warm, fluttering feeling I get when I’m making something new. Perhaps I take laundry procrastination to new heights (remember, I still have underwear, stockings, and leggings), but at least there is art and creativity up there.

Last week, I wrote a paragraph’s worth of free indirect speech in a short story I’m drafting. This little paragraph made me so happy, because out of all the third person narrative techniques I’m familiar with, free indirect speech mesmerizes me the most.

Used by famous writers like Jane Austen, Goethe, and Virginia Wolf, free indirect speech is a narrative technique that blends the distance of third person speech (S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor) with the direct engagement of first person speech (I wrote with vigor).

So, a writer can write things like:

S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor and refrained from watching Tom Hiddleston teach Cookie Monster about the importance of “delayed gratificatiion” on YouTube. The restraint will be worth the effort.

Instead of :

S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor and refrained from watching Tom Hiddleston teach Cookie Monster about the importance of “delayed gratificatiion” on YouTube.

“My restraint will be worth the effort,” she thought.

Or:

S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor and refrained from watching Tom Hiddleston teach Cookie Monster about the importance of “delayed gratificatiion” on YouTube. She thought that her restraint would be worth the effort.

Free indirect speech seamlessly allows the writer to take the reader into the thought processes of a book’s characters by incorporating their voice into the larger narrative structure. And in the process, the reader’s eye is neither distracted by the starting and stopping of direct speech’s quotations, nor is it fatigued by the constant repetition of indirect speech’s reporting phrases. I don’t know about you, but I can only read “she thought,” “he said,” “it groaned,” so many times before my innards start simmering with a quiet—yet wrathful—rage.

Because free indirect speech slips intimately into the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations of a character, a reader and character can have a communion of thought, feeling, and physicality without superfluous punctuation and phrases cutting in at inopportune times. And, within this communion of thought, there are more opportunities for the reader to cultivate empathy through directly experiencing a character’s inner life.

How I love it when writers use free indirect speech well. It makes me feel like they trust me, the reader, when they make me privy to their characters’ most intimate thoughts. Through it, their character’s can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability, I can better understand their character’s actions and interactions with others.

And, how I love it when free indirect speech occurs in my writing. For its presence reminds me that I am giving up control. I am at last trusting my readers with my characters, my narrative, and my art.

P.S. Remember that Tom Hiddleston / Cookie Monster video I used in my grammar examples above? It is quite delightful if you like Tom Hiddleston, Cookie Monster, slight Shakespearean references, cookies, and delayed gratification (or any combination of those things). So, I’m just going to leave this here…

I have so many long, high-stakes writing projects due in the next few weeks. So, after work, I come home, get out my laptop, and type towards what feels like a ridiculously large word count. As I write, I usually listen to music—The Shin’s Oh, Inverted World, Telemann’s Pastorelle en Musique, and Dvorak’s Requiem seem to be my most intimate tonal companions at the moment. Of course, these familiar songs and movements remind me of my dear musician friends: Lovely people I cannot actually talk to right now, because I have to not suck as a writer.

Yet, I feel their presence as I write. My musician friends are some of the deepest delights of my life. I love them for their kindness, their sensitivity, and above all, their patience. They gamely tolerate me, singing in their choirs, attending their premiers, and gracelessly trying to discuss music theory with them. They are the people from my inner circle who get my quiet, shy, inner life the best, understanding what makes me tick as a creator of stories.

One of my closest friends, an excellent musician and a profound writer in her own right, describes musicians and writers as opposite sides of the same coin. I get that. Especially now that I am spending most of my free time in front of a laptop. For me, music and prose are artistic expressions of sensual textures, technical excellence, and emotions. In order to produce something decent, you must mix these three things together in balanced, interesting ways. If you posses empathy and good technique, your job as a musician or writer becomes much easier. And, if you plan to read your work out loud, the sound and rhythm of words can have just as much of an impact on your audience as a beautifully sung aria.

Where they differ is in how they connect with others. Music is present, immediate. Writing, not so much. I can write in my room and have no idea what impact my work is making on others. In a music hall, there is instant gratification. You can watch the body language of the audience, wink at a friend, catch the eye of your teacher or director for affirmation. People influence your performance, whether you want them to or not. Another musician friend of mine put it well when he said: “I have spent my entire life learning how to forget that I have an audience.” This experience of forgetting is not one that I live out as I “perform” the task of writing. Instead, I spend most of my time remembering that I have an audience. Being tweeted and quoted by strangers helps this process—but, I still am surprised when the creations of my private inner life become public.

All I need to create is me and my laptop. And, I cannot get reassuring gazes from my laptop. Its screen simply mirrors me: my emotions, my fears, my mistakes, and my hopes for myself and my life with others, as I play with words and fight grammar.

As the days begin to get warmer and we begin to anticipate spring, I get to anticipate something else, just as lively, just as youthful: bobbing my hair.

After work, I shall happily walk to my downtown salon where my stylist will greet me with a hug and a smile. It will be under her loving and creative eye that my thick, wavy locks will become straight and precisely angular. Transformed, I’ll step out into the New Haven night, my gait now adjusted to a new-found, joyous swagger.

I used to have long hair as a teenager. Like really, really, long hair. All the way down to my waist. It took forever to wash and dry every morning because it was so thick—I’d spend at least an hour on its upkeep everyday. And, in order to tame its long, wild waviness, I spent a lot of my allowance and summer job money on hair products and blow dryers.

But, when I bobbed my hair in my early twenties, something wonderful happened: My hair regiment became both luxurious and speedy.

Now, I could justify buying expensive hair products. A twenty dollar bottle of shampoo would last me months rather than weeks. And, if I’d let my bob air-dry with a little bit of leave-in conditioner, I could fill up my mornings with new activities. That hour I used to spend washing and drying my hair I currently spend on doing household chores and writing. Both activities are much more sanity-inducing and soul-nurturing than standing in front of a mirror, blasting my head with hot air, ever was.

Transformed, I’ll step out into the New Haven night, my gait now adjusted to a new-found, joyous swagger.

I must confess that wearing my hair in a bob makes me feel like a rebel. Though, given this haircut’s legacy, I think that I have every right to feel a bit daring when there is more of my hair on the salon floor than on my head. Did you know that in the 1920s bobbed hair was met with raised eyebrows and shock? Young women who undertook the cut were considered unladylike upstarts by America’s then older generations. Simply by shedding those extra layers of tresses, young women began to give themselves permission to take new, individual risks in their daily lives. Risks that worried the conformist, virtuous group-think of those who came of age in the mid to late Nineteenth Century.

My favorite contemporary example of this courageous personal daring occurs in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Bernice, a pretty, but timid and dull Midwestern girl, visits her lively East Coast cousin, Marjorie. To help her overcome her dullness (and give herself something to do), Marjorie teaches Bernice how to flirt with rich, Ivy League boys, an action that costs Marjorie her own popularity. To regain her status as alpha female, Marjorie then emotionally blackmails Bernice into getting her hair bobbed—right before the young women attend a ball at the home of a staunch anti-bob society family! So, what does timid, dull Bernice do in return? Not what you’d expect. Her short hair gives her the freedom and the courage to enact revenge on her catty cousin in a rather fitting way: Marjorie also gets her hair bobbed before the ball…but, the cut happens with a pair of household shears and while she is asleep.

I think about Bernice a lot as as I rush around my house in the morning, barely keeping to schedule, but always deeply grateful for those few extra moments of writing time, or chore time, the a.m. hours continue to grant me. I think the older generations of the early Twentieth Century were right to fear the bob. It did (and does) give a rather particular freedom to women. The freedom to pursue personal development rather than a generic, societal beauty role. Though Amanda Palmer said it (or something very similar to it) about the maintenance of female body hair (or perhaps it was one of her fans who said it and she took up its mantle), I think it also applies to the bob: “The less time I spend on hair care, the more time I have for the Revolution.”

I couldn’t agree more. Even if my “Revolution” is an open space for morning writing and chores, my bobbed hair and I definitely have more time for it.